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Carnival of Mathematics #150

Welcome to the 150th Carnival of Mathematics. This is a monthly digest of selected mathematical blogs, hosted each month on a different site. The 1st Carnival has been published in February 2007, so this tradition already continues for more than 10 years. Thanks to everyone who submitted their blog posts to the 150th Carnival!

Now to the highlights of some recent mathematical blogs. Ben Orlin, the author of Math with Bad Drawings blog, published new post (with drawings!) called The State of Being Stuck. It is based on Andrew Wiles’ answer to the question by Ben asked at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2016. Being stuck is a part of the research process, and is not something to be afraid of – this is what Andrew Wiles would like to emphasize when talking about mathematics to a broader public. This year, Ben went to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum again, and you may find his account of the event here. Another blog post about the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2017 has been published by Katie Steckles on the Aperiodical.

And if you’re stuck at something and need a break, then perhaps you may find inspiration through looking at nature’s beauty – for example, LThMath suggests to look at Symmetry and Butterflies, which may reflect concepts from various areas of mathematics, ranging from analysis to algebra and statistics.

Speaking of statistics, John D. Cook discusses an interesting application in Randomized response, privacy, and Bayes theorem. Suppose you have a database with sensitive information, and you would like deliberately corrupt it with random noise to anonymise records. How this can be done in a way to preserve privacy while still keeping the data statistically useful?

Anthony Bonato has been interviewing prominent mathematicians in a series of blog posts, most recently Eugenia Cheng, researcher in category theory and the author of How to Bake Pi and Beyond Infinity, and Jennifer Chayes, one of the leading researchers in network science, working at the interface of mathematics, physics, computational science and biology.